Patrick Collinwood pulled his car over to the curb, nudging up behind a police cruiser. He got out and an officer approached him, prepared to wave him away, but he noticed the familiar heavy satchel that the Patrick was lifting from his back seat. "Excuse me, sir. CSI?" Patrick nodded. "Detective Pfeiffer is next door, talking to the roommate, but she wants to see you before you go in."

Patrick nodded, and went to the small, neat house that the officer had indicated. The door was answered by a red-eyed, elderly woman. She glanced at the ID hanging around his neck and called back over her shoulder. "Miz Pfeiffer, that man you was waiting on is here." She looked at Collinwood, her gaze both sorrowful and belligerent. "You're gonna catch that bastard." It wasn't a question--it was an order.

"I'm going to do my damndest, ma'am." She let him in.

The living room was cramped, stuffed with furniture that was too big for the space, and every flat surface was crammed with framed photographs of various smiling children. Detective Mitchell Pfeiffer ("That's Mitchell, and no, I'm no relation, and yes, I know it's a boy's name. What can I say? My mother was ahead of her time.") was sitting on the plump love seat, next to a slender blonde woman, who was weeping quietly into a soggy tissue.

She looked up at Patrick as he entered, giving him a silent nod, and tilting her head toward an armchair opposite the seat. He sat and, since there was a cluttered occasional table on each side, held his case on his lap. He hoped this wouldn't take long--the case was damn heavy, and he'd rather not have ridges cut into his thighs.

Patrick was well aware that a big part of a homicide detective's work was just listening, and sometimes that involved listening to a witness or suspect sob until they were ready to get on with it. Mitch was good at that, especially with the relatives of the victims. She looked like a high school kid, with her gamine cut red hair and wide blue eyes. Patrick knew that the haircut was a hold-over from her days working vice, when long hair could be a hazard in a fight with a perp ("I'm not about to be snatched bald headed by some pissed off hooker if I can prevent it."), and the guileless eyes masked a sharp, ruthless drive to take down 'the bad guys'. She was in her late twenties, had been working homicide for three years, and had a very good record.

The blonde woman wiped her eyes one more time, and said, "I'm sorry."

"It's all right, Miss Caldwell. You've had a horrible experience--we don't expect stoicism. Can you talk a little now?" The girl nodded. "This is Patrick Collinwood--he'll be processing the scene next door. He's very good, very thorough. Believe me, if the murderer left even a scrap of evidence, Patrick will find it, and we'll use it to nail the monster who did this to your friend."

The woman shredded the tissue. Her voice was clogged. "You'll go for the death penalty?"

"That isn't our call. It will depend on what circumstances are attached. If the DA finds aggravating circumstances, there's a VERY strong chance he'll call for the death penalty."

"What, you mean the simple fact that the bastard killed her isn't enough to get him the death penalty? That sucks." Mitch started to say something, but the woman waved her to silence. "Yeah, yeah, I know it's not your fault. I need to get up off my lazy ass and vote if I want it changed. But he was stalking her, he terrorized her," her voice wavered, "and I think the sicko must've molested her before she died. If one of those don't do it, there's something really wrong with this world."

"You'll get no argument from me on that, Linda," said Mitch softly. "I know this is hard for you, but I want to give Pat a quick overview before he goes in."

"Sure, anything. Where do I start?"

"Just tell us a little about your friend, how you discovered the crime, and what you believe led up to it. You don't have to go into great detail this first time. If Pat knows a little bit about what he's walking in to, he'll have a better idea of what to look for." She looked at Patrick. "Pat, our victim is Shirley Ann Thomas..."

"Shy." Mitch looked at Linda questioningly. "She liked to be called Shy. That was her net name. It fit her in real life--she was real shy, wouldn't say boo to a cat. But on the net she opened up some..." Her lips worked. "That's what killed her."

Mitch patted the woman's hand. "Miss Thomas was thirty-five. She worked as a free lance writer, and according to Miss Collinwood didn't go out much."

"I'm the outside one," said Linda. "She wasn't exactly agoraphobic, but she just didn't like being around many people at once. I did all the shopping, and errands, and stuff. I'm good with people." She gave a watery smile. "Shy said I was her personality, but she was wrong! She thought she was boring, but she was special! Wasn't she, Mrs. Wilkins?"

The old lady had brought the young woman a fresh tissue. "That she was, dear," said the woman gently. "She lived next door for over ten years, and she was just like a grandchild to me." She patted Linda's shoulders. "I was so glad when she found you. She loved you very much, you know."

Linda nodded, squeezing Mrs. Wilkins' hand, and Patrick shot a questioning look at Mitch. She shrugged. Linda caught the look though, and her next remark was proudly defiant. "She was my wife. Yeah, it isn't legal here in Nevada, but we had a commitment ceremony, and did everything we could to bind ourselves in the eyes of God and man." She covered her eyes briefly. "We were even talking about looking into artificial insemination, so we could have a baby. She'd have been a terrific mother." She cleared her throat. "Anyway, I had to go away this weekend to some crap public relations seminar. I didn't want to go, but it would've really been a plus the next time I came up for promotion, and Shy insisted that she'd be okay. She always worried that I was gonna miss out on something from taking care of her. I kept telling her that taking care of her was what I was all about--nothing else really mattered."

She was staring down at her left hand, twisting a thick, plain gold band. "I've had to go away a couple of times before, and it was always okay. Mrs. Wilkins is right here, and she and Shy are... were tight, so I knew she'd check up on her. I went." Her lips trembled. "I knew some shit was up, and she was scared, and I still left her alone, and that fucker came in and killed my baby!"

She broke down, sobbing helplessly, and the old lady embraced her over the sofa back, rocking her and crooning meaningless, comforting sounds. Mitch said quietly, "Mrs. Wilkins, she's not up to this right now. I'm going to take Pat next door. I think I can tell him whatever else he needs to know right now. You try to calm her down, and I'll be back in a few."

Mrs. Wilkins nodded. "Go on. I have a little brandy--strictly for medicinal purposes, and if this doesn't qualify, I don't know what does. I'll fix her some Irish coffee."

Mitch and Patrick got up and went outside. As they walked toward the next house, Mitchell said, "The paramedics came this close to sedating her, but she pulled herself together through sheer cussedness. She's determined that she's going to make whoever did this pay, and if force of will counts for anything, she has a shot at it. Anyway, the victim is thirty-five, Caucasian with sandy hair, seems to have been in fairly good physical condition, considering that she didn't get much exercise."

They paused on the lawn. The uniformed officer guarding the front door was giving the clots of neighbors gathered around the perimeter hard looks. "Linda Caldwell returned to the house from her trip at eight-thirty. She called out to Thomas the moment she entered, and received no answer. She was immediately suspicious, because the victim was a morning person, never slept past eight am, and always answered immediately. It was a private joke between them, sort of 'Lucy, I'm home'. Anyway, she found her in their bed. Coroner will make the official call, of course, but best guess would say she was strangled."

He grunted as they entered the house. "Nasty. Bad enough if you're just a roommate, but when you're a... Well, roommate. Anyway, what are you doing out here? I thought that you weren't working individual cases since you went up to Detective II."

"I'm not. We think that this is related to some other cases."

Patrick blinked. "Plural? Damn, a serial killer?"

"It's beginning to look like it. She's back here." They stepped into the bedroom.

The body was on the bed. Her hands were tucked behind her back, and her legs were spraddled wide in the classic pose of a sexual assault victim, but her cotton gown was pulled down over her thighs. The medical examiner was just straightening up from the body. He nodded to them. "Hullo, Pat. It isn't messy, but it's still pretty bad. I'm going to have to do the autopsy to tell you what killed her--strangulation, suffocation, or beating, but there's no doubt it was homicide."

Patrick was studying the corpse's face. It was swollen, the skin dusky. It was hard to tell if she'd been pretty in life. "No doubt at all. Anything been moved?"

One of the paramedics who were standing in the corner said, "The other lady said there was a sheet wadded up over her face." He pointed to a pile of fabric on the floor beside the bed. "Can't blame her for pulling it off--she had to check to see if there was a chance her friend was still alive."

Patrick set down his case and opened it He pulled on a pair of latex gloves, then removed an instamatic camera from the case. "Okay. Let me grab some photographs, and you boys can take this poor lady in."

The medical examiner left as Pat began moving around the bed, snapping pictures from every angle imaginable. "Mitch, what makes this different from any other?"

"She'd been in contact with the station for a couple of weeks, and from what I heard this started about a month before that. She'd been getting progressively weirder emails from some kook, but it took that long for Linda to convince her to come in to make a complaint. She practically had to drag her in by the hair as it was. The officer who was taking her statement was all set to give her the standard 'these guys usually aren't a threat. They're too scared to confront you face to face' shit when another one reminded him that anything concerning a woman being cyber-stalked was red flagged. There's been four cases in Nevada, and one each in Arizona and California in the past year that started out the same way."

Pat lowered the camera in shock. "Six? Why haven't I heard about this before?"

"Because no one tied them together till about four months ago. This was the first case that fit the profile. We were trying to talk Shirley into co-operating, maybe helping us set up a sting operation, but she was scared."

Pat grunted. "Looks like she had reason to be. Did she let him in?"

"No, he came in through the garage. The shitty thing is that they had an alarm--installed it just last week, but the fucker got around it."

"Maybe she forgot to set it?"

Mitch shook her head. "According to Mrs. Wilkins, she was religious about it. She was the sort who didn't let the door settle in the frame without locking it. No, the guy disabled it. I'm not sure how yet, but it isn't operational, and it was working fine when Linda left for her trip--she set it herself."

"Shit. So we're dealing not only with a violent sicko, but a smart violent sicko."

"The worst kind. They'll send me all the available information, but from what I remember they don't have a hell of a lot, considering the number of scenes that were worked. There are a couple of unidentified fingerprints, but some of those could be from innocent visitors to the victims' homes--at least one of them had an open house party right before the murder. Then there are some hairs, and a couple of semen samples, but none of the collected evidence matches anything in the data base so far." She sighed. "Those are the ones we know about. There might be others that haven't sifted through the warning points, or haven't been reported from other regions." She shook her head. "He's going to do it again, Pat, unless he dies, or we catch him first. If only the next one comes to us earlier..." She winced. "God, I hate that term--'the next one'."

Pat watched as the paramedics gently deposited the limp body in a black bag, and lowered it onto a stretcher. "Well, here's hoping I can find something that'll help strap his ass on a gurney." He reached into his bag for a can of luminol.

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